The Oracle DBA… A dying breed?

 

I’ve updated the site notes for my OpenWorld unconference session. If you fancy having a look, it’s on the Oracle Wiki.

It’s quite hard to summarize the conversation, but I think I got the gist of it down. Remember, the notes are trying to convey the opinions of the people present. I’m not saying this was a representative sample of people, but the opinions and attititudes was certainly quite interesting to me.

Cheers

Tim…

Update: The Oracle Wiki page was removed.

Author: Tim...

DBA, Developer, Author, Trainer.

One thought on “The Oracle DBA… A dying breed?”

  1. I attended and much enjoyed your unconference. A good reality check. And I had talked to you afterward, about how my management and regulatory climate around change management (Sarbanes Oxley etc) seemed to be in opposition to our general conclusion that transferring some traditional responsibilities that used to be DBA only to be allowed for Developers or SysAdmins.

    Looking at it from a change management perspective, every change I implement has to be a file checked into a PVCS source base and submitted through peer review and management approval processes. sql/ddl scripts edited with vi or notepad and deployed using sqlplus, the same sort of thing I did in Oracle 7 years ago. So for this GUI tools like OEM Grid that make changes easier to do with a few mouse clicks don’t help so much, it just contradicts our change management discipline.

    What I look for is not so much a tool for a DBA to make it easier to do DBA stuff, what I need is more like a tool that is useful for communicating/collaborating with the other teams that I regularly interact with, which includes Developers, SysAdmins, Incident Management, Change Mangement, Help Desk, Network, Security, Architecture&Engineering and Finance.

    What I really need is to set up monitoring/reports/alerts that I can show to or give access to those other team members to see online. I’m looking at OEM public reports, though notably not many of the out-of-the-box reports are very useful to communicate outside of the DBA team usually being too complicated and focusing on the Oracle internals, when what I need is simpler. I need to break it down to a few simple pie charts we can present to Architecture and Finance to justify why we need to purchase more disks or memory or such. Or a report I can generate to Network showing the frequency of dropped sqlnet connections. Or to get really simple, bunch of green (up) / red (down) lights next to a list of database and associated application names, which would be useful to Help Desk and Incident Management to direct triage of problems.

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